Charter school administrators increasingly suspect that the very state office that was originally set up to assist them has unfairly targeted them.
Acting on a recommendation from the Office of Charter Schools, the State Board of Education is set to impose fines on charter schools that fail to hire the proper ratios of fully certified teachers.
While no charter school administrator has complained about having to meet the ratios — only one of the state’s 98 charter schools is known to be out of compliance — many administrators think the new policy is unnecessary and poorly thought out.
They also fear the policy could drive smaller charters out of business.
Recently, some administrators have begun to think the Department of Public Instruction and its Office of Charter Schools is behaving more like an adversary than an advocate.
The immediate cause for concern is a proposal to dock the equivalent of one month of a principal’s salary for every month a school has a lower ratio of certified-to-noncertified teachers than the law allows. For elementary and middle grades, the ratio is 75 percent. For high schools the ratio is 50 percent.
Increased penalties
The penalties get worse each month the school is out of compliance. If a school hasn’t hired enough certified teachers by the second month, it must forfeit not only the amount of the principal’s monthly pay, but that of the highest-paid teacher as well. The penalty increases each month by the amount that the next-highest-paid teacher makes, until the school either comes into compliance or goes broke. Schools that still haven’t met the ratios by February of each school year could have their charters revoked.
Speaking before the State Board’s meeting in March, Office of Charter Schools Director Jack Moyer stressed that the new policy treats charter schools the same way regular school districts are treated. School districts lose the amount they pay their superintendents if they hire too many noncertified teachers.
However, there is no provision equivalent to revocation of charter for a school district, and because of the difference in size and the precarious financial state of charters relative to district schools, the loss of even one employee’s salary could spell doom for a charter.
In his presentation to the board, Moyer admitted that since charter schoolteachers are not on the state payroll system, it would be difficult to track their certification status on a month-to-month basis. He stressed that his office and charter schools have plenty of time to work out the details of how they are going to get around that problem.
“I think we’re going to be working on it for quite a while, and October first [the earliest that the policy could go in to effect] is a long time away,” he said.
Charter school administrators doubt it will be that easy. Many complain that DPI’s licensure section, the office that has final authority over teacher certification, is slow to help charter schools and often gives out erroneous information.
“Our experience with the licensure section is rarely positive, and their information is often incorrect,” said one charter school administrator who asked not to be identified for this story.
This administrator also said smaller, newer charter schools would be especially disadvantaged by the new policy because they don’t have trained and experienced office personnel who know how to deal effectively with the licensure section to resolve problems.
Possible fatal errors
With the proposed penalties in place, an error by the licensure section could be fatal to a small charter school, especially if it takes several months to confirm that a teacher has met certification requirements. Worse, there are no provisions in the policy for refunding money to a charter school in the event that the licensure section makes a mistake.
Even under the best of circumstances, getting timely, accurate information from the licensure section is difficult. Ken Templeton, headmaster of the highly successful Union Academy charter school in Monroe, has more than 10 years’ experience dealing with licensure in North Carolina, and more than 80 percent of his teachers are certified.
He cites other problems with the policy: “Those of us most familiar with certification criteria know well that certification requirements change quite regularly and create challenges to well-qualified teachers in all public schools almost annually.”
Officials in regular public schools support his view. By an odd coincidence, a group of regular public school superintendents was in Raleigh the week after the State Board meeting to speak before a joint legislative oversight committee about problems in public school governance structure, and all eight of them cited significant problems with teacher licensure. One specifically mentioned the difficulties occasioned by untimely changes in certification requirements. Another said the current system was “an embarrassment.”
Most complained that the office is too understaffed to provide timely help. Reeves McGlohon, superintendent of Gaston County Schools, told the committee, “If we’re going to have a state system of certification, we need to have the resources to do it right.”
The new policy is only one in a recent string of events that has many charter school advocates convinced that the education establishment is trying to shut them down.
From their debut in 1996, charter schools enjoyed a mutually respectful relationship with DPI and the Office of Charter Schools. That all began to change last year when the State Board abolished the Charter School Advisory Board, which had served as a resource, and occasionally as an advocate, for charter schools at the state level. That move was taken without input from charter schools.
In the last session of the General Assembly, bill H236 was filed. The bill would mandate the closure of charter schools that did not meet expected growth for five consecutive years. The bill was not voted on before the close of the session, but a special Blue-Ribbon Commission on Charter Schools later that year made a recommendation that was essentially identical to the bill.
Change of attitude
Charter school administrators say they sense a change in attitude in DPI toward their schools. One veteran charter school administrator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the abolition of the advisory board was “sold to charter schools as an intermediate step” but that the real effect has been that “charter schools don’t have a voice anymore, and they need one because they are so different.”
He said that charter administrators no longer trust DPI and that communication between DPI and charter schools is poor.
Jim Stegall is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.